Alphabet's Waymo Announces 250,000 Weekly Paid Rides Across Four US Cities, Sundar Pichai Says Personal Ownership 'An Option' In The Future
Alphabet Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Waymo announced it has reached the 250,000 weekly paid robotaxi rides milestone.
What Happened: The company says it is providing fully autonomous paid rides in cities like Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, in a video shared on the social media platform X on Thursday.
The announcement comes in as Alphabet held its Q1 2025 earnings call with investors. CEO Sundar Pichai shed some light on the company's plans in the earnings call. "I’m excited about the progress the teams have made through a variety of partnerships," he said.
Pichai hailed the company's partnership with Uber Technologies Inc. (NYSE:UBER) and shared that Waymo will offer paid rides via Uber in Atlanta later this year.
Pichai also shared how Waymo could provide personal ownership of vehicles as well. "There are future optionality around personal ownership as well," he said. However, the CEO didn't provide a timeline for it.
Alphabet's updates on Waymo drew comments from Deepwater Asset Management's Gene Munster. Munster shared in a post on X how Waymo was ‘the most exciting thing' at Alphabet.
Interestingly, Munster shared that Waymo would need to significantly reduce costs to compete with Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA). "They have to get the cost of the vehicle from around $100k today (my estimate) to $30k to compete with Tesla," he said.
Why It Matters: Waymo's announcement follows the swift development of the autonomous ride-hailing ecosystem in the U.S., which the company currently leads by a healthy margin.
Recently, Tesla announced it had rolled out its robotaxi services running via Supervised FSD in a limited run for its employees in Austin as well as the S.F. Bay Area.
Tesla is all set to fully roll out its robotaxi services in Austin in June, less than two months from now, according to CEO Elon Musk's statement with the investors at Tuesday evening's earnings call.
Elsewhere, the Trump administration also announced the easing of regulations as well as exemptions to domestic autonomous vehicle manufacturers in what could be a boost to self-driving companies around the U.S.
Price Action: GOOG is currently trading for $161.47 on the NASDAQ, according to Benzinga Pro data.
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